The Locked Room Reader V: A Selection of Lost Detective Stories

One of the well-worn tropes of the
traditional detective story is the long-lost manuscript of a famous novelist or
playwright, usually by the Bard of Avon, which has since become a bit of a
cliché, but John
Dickson Carr found an original use for this plot-mechanism in The Mad
Hatter Mystery (1933) – which entails a hitherto unheard of Auguste
Dupin tale by Edgar
Allan Poe. Carr even "reproduced" a short and convincing passage from this
lost detective story.

At the time, I was intrigued by the idea
of lost and forgotten detective stories, but, naively, assumed they were
artifacts of fiction. Well, I soon learned that lost detective stories and
unpublished manuscripts are far more common outside of the printed page than I
expected. This realization came with a collection of short stories.

A long-lost, pseudonymous JDC novel?

The late Robert Adey, who compiled Locked
Room Murders (1991), wrote an introduction for Banner Deadlines: The
Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), in which he mentioned Joseph Commings attempted
to transition from writing short stories to writing novels – an attempt that
ended in the most tragic loss on this list.

During the 1960s, Commings found "sales of
short fiction were either slow or stationary" and tried his hand as
novelist. Adey mentioned how Commings "vividly recalled a lunch he once had
with John Dickson Carr," someone he greatly admired, who was very
enthusiastic about the idea and had some sage advice for the budding novelist: "why not make it a locked room?" The first attempt, The Doctor Died
First, was aborted after only four chapters, but Commings eventually
completed four, full-length mystery novels starring his series detective,
Senator Brooks U. Banner. All of them are now considered to be lost
manuscripts!

One of them, the New Orleans set Dancers in
the Dark, was dispatched by a literary agent to France and "was never
seen again." The remaining three novels, Operation Pink Poodle, The
Crimson Stain and One for the Devil, which was described "along
the lines of a Carr novel and containing two impossible murders," were
rejected by every publisher in New York and time probably reduced them to
crumbling pages of carbon – never to be read on this plain of existence.

From all of the missing and unpublished
manuscripts, the lost of One for the Devil stings the most. I would
accept every other title mentioned in this blog-post as irreversibly lost in
exchange for One for the Devil. Yes. There are many more examples of
this.

Edward
D. Hoch wrote a short introduction for The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant
(2003) and mentions how C. Daly
King, "encouraged by Dannay's praise of the
Tarrant stories," completed the manuscript for a full-length Mr. Tarrant
novel, The Episode of Demoiselle D’ys, which was to be published in 1946
or 1947. But the book never got any further than an announcement in Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine.

On his excellent website, called "A Guide to Classic Mystery and
Detection," Mike Grost labeled King's long-lost novel a piece of evidence
of "the deliberate suppression of the traditional detective story after 1945
by publishers." Grost also alluded to other well-known mystery writers who
began to have hard time getting their work published, such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, T.S. Stribling and Milton M. Propper, but the
most notable name on this list is that of Hake Talbot – a locked
room artisan who failed to find a publisher for his third Rogan Kincaid novel, The
Affair of the Half-Witness. It's a book that joins that long, lamentable
list of lost and unpublished detective stories.

A lesser-known example of a lost manuscript
happened to a massively underrated writer, Glyn
Carr, who specialized in mountaineering mysteries and had several of his
mystery novels reissued by the now defunct Rue Morgue Press. Some of the latter
reprints had a shortened and revised introduction, which mentioned the following
in passing: over a period of eighteen years, Carr produced fourteen Abercrombie
Lewker books, but they number fifteen in total if you count "one last,
currently lost unpublished manuscript." Nothing else is known about it.

The next example is a truly obscure one.
On his blog, Curt Evans
dedicated several blog-posts to a long-forgotten mystery novelist, Theodora DuBois,
who wrote primarily between the late 1930s and early 50s, but her profile-page
on GADWiki tells how one of her last works, Seeing Red (1954), caused somewhat
of a backlash – which made her publisher, Doubleday, back off of her work. And
that pretty much spelled the beginning of the end for her literary career.

Once a lost, unpublished story

Regardless, DeBois "continued writing and
the collection contains several unpublished manuscripts written in her later
years." Her papers are archived at the City
University of New York and you can find a listing of her unpublished work
on their website, which includes such titles as The Fearful Guest (1942),
The Mayverell Plot (c. 1965-75) and Sweet Poison (c. 1970).

So they're not completely lost forever
and I've several more of such examples, but first there's one more lost
manuscript that ought to be acknowledged on this blog.

Over the pass twelve months, I've
reviewed several novels from The Three Investigators series, which were penned
by such writers as Robert
Arthur, William
Arden and M.V.
Carey, but even this fairly innocent series suffered a great loss: a number
of websites,
dedicated to The Three Investigators, mention a forty-fourth book, The
Mystery of the Ghost Train. Carey and an editor were working on this title
when the series was cancelled in 1986 and "it is not known with certainty
whether or not a manuscript still exists."

Thankfully, there are also several, fairly
well known cases of unpublished manuscripts that are in "cold storage." Here
are two of them.

Officially, Anthony
Boucher's first novel, The
Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937), is a standalone mystery, but he
did write a follow-up to this story, The Case of the Toad-in-the-Hole, which
is patiently waiting for an editor/publisher in the Lily Library at Indiana University
in Bloomington, Indiana.

Tony Medawar is a mystery scholar and
editor who compiled a volume of Christianna
Brand's short fiction, entitled The
Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries (2002), which contained "a
previously unpublished three-act detective drama featuring Cockrill." On
January 3, 2010, Medawar dropped a message
on the GAD Yahoo Group informing everyone that Cockrill appeared in an
unpublished novel, The Chinese Puzzle, and her secondary character,
Charlesworth, was at the center of unpublished novella, "The Dead Hold Fast."

So these unpublished, but shelved, mystery
novels offer us a slim change that some of these lost detective stories will
one day find a home on our shelves. After all, June Wright's Duck
Season Death (c. 1955) and Ellery Queen's The
Tragedy of Errors and Others (1999) were once forgotten, unpublished
and pretty much lost detective stories. As long as they're kept in storage,
there's a future opportunity to publish them.

Finally, some of you are probably very
curious about the old-school, black-and-white photocopied book cover of The
Problem of the Black Road (1941) by Philip Jacoby. Is it really a long-lost,
forgotten John Dickson Carr novel? Unfortunately... no. The cover is a complete
and utter fake. It was used as a convincer for a hoax perpetrated by Bill
Pronzini and the publisher of a 1980s fanzine, Collecting Paperbacks,
which was done to see if they could fool collectors into believing they had
stumbled across a remnant of an obscure, short-lived wartime paperback outfit –
called Sceptre Books. On top of that, they claimed Carr must have written the
story, because the writing, characters and plot were all covered with his
tell-tale fingerprints. Hoch was apparently the first one who saw through the
hoax.

Sorry if I got your hopes up and for this
very depressing blog-post, but, hopefully, most of you found it still
interesting and the next blog-post will probably be mystery novel that was
recently brought back into print. So some things are looking up!

23 comments:

On the other hand, look on the bright side; if the didn't sell, a certain percentage of them were probably bombs. Something always looks better to us when we know we can't have it. I don't know if we can really support a case that publishers would not publish fair-play style mysteries after 1945, when we see that Freeman Wills Crofts, Agatha Christie, H.C. Bailey, John Rhode, etc. all had books published in their accustomed style after 1945. It is just that mighty Mike Hammer and the hardboiled p.i. was the dominant mode of production after 1947.

Well, the writers who had their books published in their accustomed style, after 1945, were all household names with an established audience. Ones who suffered from these rejections lacked name recognition and had a much smaller readership. They never got an opportunity to work at building up such an audience.

I agree there must have been some bombs among them, but Talbot's follow-up to Hangman's Handyman and Rim of the Pit does not sound exactly like a dull dud to me. Same goes for Commings' attempt at the novel-length mysteries. Mike Hammer and his hardboiled friends seem like a very bad and poor trade-off for these lost mysteries.

I didn't say they were good (although some of them were, Spillane and Ross Macdonald in particular, and Chandler did his best work after the war), just that they were the dominant mode. The hard-boiled p.i. has its own set of virtues. I imagine that the destructiveness of the war also changed the tastes of mystery readers, because the hard-boiled p. I. existed long before the war, he just was not dominant. The fair-play mystery was probably tapped out by that point anyway; there are just so many variations you can have on the locked room.

Commings, King and Talbot tried to continue the tradition of the fair-play and locked room mystery, but they got rejected.

During the 1980s, Resnicow showed new variations on the locked room theme and some interesting impossible crime ideas (e.g. corpse puzzle) have come out of Japan. So who knows what we could have seen, if publishers had continued to back the traditional mystery to the hilt.

Although the solutions to some of Commings' Banner stories that I've read in the Crippen & Landru collection were a little too mechanical for my taste, I nevertheless enjoyed them. Talbot's RIM OF THE PIT--though some disparage it--is, to my mind, one of the greatest impossible crime novels of them all.

I have to agree with Anonymous about the hardboiled and noir schools dominating the market after WWII, but many a hardboiled detective novel was fairly-clued, and some even included locked rooms and other seeming impossibilities.

But as for the fair-play locked-room/impossible crime story being "tapped out, one only has to look to Paul Halter for some brilliant takes on the genre. Granted that he's far from stellar when it comes to characterization, that his sense of atmosphere is only so-so, and that he scrupulously avoids the big dramatic scene, some of his plot devices are nevertheless extremely clever.

Overall, however, it's a pity that these authors and others you cite are, barring happy future surprises, lost to fans of this kind of mystery. (May I live long enough to read them if they surface!)

I would suggest that by the late 1940s, the fair play mystery was tapped out, in that the fair play possibilities of that social system and that level of technology had been used up. However, by now there has been sufficient social and technological change to fill up the well with new ideas for fair play mysteries (except in Japan). The problem is that I don't see hardly anyone using the new opportunities here in the West.

@Barry: there are degrees of mechanical solutions. Commings'"Murder Under Glass" has both an original problem (murder inside a sealed room of glass) and a clever, but mechanical, explanation. Compare this to messy, overly complex solution from Carr's The Problem of the Wire Cage.

And what if One for the Devil has some impossible crimes as new and original as "Bones for Davy Jones"? I NEED TO KNOW, BARRY! I NEED TO KNOW!

Yeah, given how many accepted classics have lingered and drifted out of print and beyond the availability of most mortals, it shouldn't really be a surprise that some possible classics never even got to see the light of day to begin with. It is entirely possible that they weren't especially good, of course, but I'm a firm believer in reading a book and discovering it to not be to your taste rather than having to spend a lifetime wondering!

Ans as much as you'd love to see the Commings, I'd personally bur all ther others you mention for someone to stumble across that Hake Talbot manuscript and pass it onto Ramble House (the current publisher of Talbot's first two novels). Aaaah, a man can dream...

You would actually pick The Affair of the Half-Witness over One for the Devil?

I love Talbot as much as the next locked room fanboy, but Commings' story is a Carr-style mystery novel and features two impossible murders! TWO! If I had to pick between the two, it would be Commings.

Maybe we can ask Satan a favor and ask for both of them? We have mutual friend in Carr. ;)

Never heard of that Philip Jacoby hoax. But I don't know how any real collector or bookseller could be fooled by that obvious fake. The design template is clearly lifted from Penguin Books and that similarity alone ought to have been a red flag.

Obviously, it's a fake, but, apparently, the cover seemed far more credible in the days before Photoshop, which, in this case, was the early 1980s. Even a simple fake, such as this cover, required some handy work. Pronzini also wrote a convincing account of how he came across the book with a report on the obscure, wartime publisher. I think this included an explanation as to why the cover looked similar to that of other publishers.

Without the internet at your fingertips, it was far easier to full for such a hoax.

Don't forget that a fifth "Don Diavolo, the Scarlet Wizard" novella by Clayton Rawson (writing as "Stuart Towne") was promised for the Feb. 1941 issue of RED STAR MYSTERY -- which was never published. I'd presume Rawson would have already written it, but that it's now lost (or Battered Silicon or some other publisher would have ferreted it out and published it). The Towne stories are not up to Rawson's "Merlini" work, but I'd gladly snap up the Diavolo novella if it ever does surface. / Denny Lien

The Usual Suspect

An Elementary Observation

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants.

Witnesses' Statements

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre)."The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).